Artist and writer Mark Kneeskern says the easy thing about most of his creative work is he just lets it tell him what to do. Surely it was a strange creative voice inside his head that laid out his costume for the opening of his Sixth Annual Funky Junk art show at the Starlight Theatre last Saturday.
The themed outfit was dreadlocks (long braids of hair) and mud.
"I started walking around in the desert looking for material," Kneeskern said, "and I wasn't finding much. Then I remembered I had burlap coffee bags from a coffee shop up in Colorado."
He needed to cover his body somehow, but he didn't want anything on his upper body because it was hot.
"So I made a skirt, a tribal skirt," the artisan of the weird explained. "It was like an African kilt. I was thinking tribal since the show is funky junk. I told people they could come as white trash or tribal trash. I went for the tribal trash."
He cut the bags up.
"It was like dreadlocks, and I started tying all these dreadlock things to my hair with twine. So I had all these crazy things hanging off my head. My hair was getting all tangled up. But I had to cover the top of my head because it didn't match the dreadlocks. I thought mud."
To him that was perfect. To him it was fun to play with mud anyway, cover yourself with mud.
"Whenever you get the chance as an adult, you feel like a kid again," Kneeskern said. "So I started splattering myself with mud. It fit right in with the dreadlocks."
He slept that night with all that mud on him.
"We don't have a shower, and I didn't want to start dumping water on my head. I had been partying quite hard--we always have a great time opening night. I crashed out in my mud and dreadlocks right next to Shannon (Carter).
Photo by Jessica Lutz
"She looked over at me this morning and just started laughing--dirt all over the bed. She was too amused to get mad."
No one knows what to expect opening night.
Clayton Drinkard came in with boxes all over his body. He was a box man and "had a TV set on his head. He does political humor stuff now and then, so he was a propaganda man. And then a couple of other friends showed up with all this junk strapped to their bodies. They were warriors. And then Shannon always does an amazing costume. That's her high art."
There were a couple of streakers, too.
"I was shocked."
Kneeskern said there's always a bunch of people that dress up for every show. "That's one of the fun things about it. Some people just like to make costumes. I'm really happy about people participating in that way."
And then there were among all the junk art the huge ponderosa pine logs which Joe and Sue Rife brought Kneeskern from Steamboat Springs. He carved them as the the logs told him what to do.
"They are like totem poles," the artist said, "but they aren't that tall, maybe five feet or so. I peel the bark off, and then I start looking at them. The parts that want to be chopped off--they tell me--I chop them off. Then I start looking for a face.
"It will always come out. There's the nose. Now where's the eyes, where's the mouth? As I'm working, it will change. Sometimes it will change dramatically, do a 180 and there's a better face. And so that is the art form of carving. It takes a long time. Not as long as writing. It took so long to do that book."
The book is "The Last American Hitch-hiker: Tale of Wander," published last year. And Kneeskern took a sabbatical from speaking about his art. "Most people who get my book used to hitch-hike," the writer said. "I'm still on a book tour. I'm going to do talks wherever I go."
Photo by Voni Glaves
He plans another book. "What I'm going to do is write about buses and trains. This year I had my broken foot so I ended up riding the Greyhound, and, of course, I had to write about it, otherwise it would have been torture and no dividend.
"These people have all these crazy life stories. It's like hitch-hiking except you are trapped in a bus. You get stressed out because you have to make the bus on time, the connections. Whereas when you are hitch-hiking, you have no idea when your connection is going to come.
"You have a lot of prisoners on there," he said, "people who have been in prison, on their way to prison, or should be in prison. I may be one of them."
As for shaping those logs, "I use a plain old hatchet," he said. "But it is funky junk, and where I bring the funky junk in is the hat. I go out into my junkyard. I have a pretty good junkyard now. People give me junk all the time. It's like a filing cabinet for junk.
"I try all these different hats before I find the right one. It takes awhile, because they have personalities, you know. Certain hats don't look right on me or you. I consider them to be real people in a way. And then I paint them."
Funky Junk runs through March.
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